Tag: DeFi

Money and banking in CryptoLand

Marc Rubinstein (Net Interest) recently wrote an interesting post titled “My Adventures in CryptoLand” that I found very helpful in helping me better understand what is going on in this new area of decentralised finance (DeFi). He has followed up with a post titled “Reinventing the Financial System” which explores how MakerDAO is building a “decentralised bank”. I am a bit uncomfortable with applying the term “bank” to the financial entity that MakerDAO is building but I don’t want to derail the discussion with what may be perceived as semantics so I will run wth the term for the purposes of this post.

What is interesting for students of banking is the parallels that Rubinstein notes between MakerDAO and the free banking systems that evolved during the 18th and 19th centuries. Scotland is one of the poster children of this style of banking and we can see a legacy of that system (albeit much more regulated and so not true free banking) in the form of the private bank notes that the three Scottish banks still issue in their own name. He quotes Rune Christensen (founder of MakerDAO) describing the way in which his project accidentally developed a form of fractional reserve banking”

In the very beginning of the project, I remember we didn’t even realise, in the beginning of Maker, that we were essentially just building a protocol that did the same things as fractional reserve banking, did something very similar to how a banking balance sheet works and we were just implementing that as a blockchain protocol. We thought we were doing something completely, totally different from how money usually worked in the traditional sense.” (source)

“Reinventing the Financial System” Marc Rubinstein Net Interest Newsletter, 12 June 2021

This statement should be qualified by the fact that they can only do this (i.e. replicate fractional reserve banking) because the currency of the decentralised bank is a form of money called Dai. Fractional Reserve Banking has proved to be a risky form of financial technology in the conventional banking system which has developed a range of tools to manage that risk (e.g. capital adequacy and liquidity requirements, deposit preference arrangements often coupled with deposit insurance to insulate the “money” part of the bank balance sheet from risk, high levels of supervision and other restrictions on the types of assets a bank can lend against).

MakerDAO has a stabilisation mechanism that employs “smart contracts” that manage the price of Dai by managing its supply and demand. The pros and cons of the various stabilisation mechanisms that underpin stable coins like Dai is a topic for another day.

Rubinstein describes the MakerDAO lending and “money” creation process as follows:

The bank he devised to create his money … works like this:

An investor comes into Maker DAO for a loan. He (yep, usually he) has some collateral he’s happy to keep locked in a vault. Right now, that collateral is usually a crypto asset like Ethereum. For every $100 worth of crypto assets, Maker is typically prepared to lend $66 – the gap adding a buffer of protection against a possible fall in the value of the collateral. Maker accepts the collateral and advances a loan, which it does by issuing its Dai money. 

So what?

At this stage I am not sure where this is headed. It is not clear, for example, if the purpose of this “bank” is simply to create more Dai via trading in crypto-assets or to build something that translate outside CryptoLand. Rubinstein quotes Rune Christensen himself stating that

I don’t think that it will necessarily replace everything… The traditional financial system will actually largely remain the way it is. It will just replace certain parts of it that right now are really bad and really old… those things will be replaced with DeFi and blockchain, but the actual bank itself probably will remain.”

I am a long way from figuring this out but Marc’s post is I think worth reading for anyone who want to understand where these new (or possibly reinvented) forms of finance are heading. To the extent that DeFi is reinventing things that have been tried before, I suspect it would be useful to reflect on why free banking is no longer the way the conventional banking system operates. That is another topic for another day.

Tony – From the Outside

Joe Wiesenthal contrasts the differing visions represented by Bitcoin and Ethereum

Joe Weisenthal (Bloomberg) wrote an interesting opinion piece discussing the differing visions that Bitcoin and Ethereum offer for the future of finance and money. I am a self declared neophyte in the world of cryptocurrency and DeFi so it may be that the experts in those domains will find fault but I found his thesis interesting. The article is behind the Bloomberg paywall but this is what I took away from it.

  • He starts with the observation that, after a decade since its inception, we seem to have arrived at the consensus that Bitcoin is best thought of as something like a digital version of gold (or “digital gold”).
  • That was not necessarily the original intent and battles have been fought between different factions in the Bitcoin community over differing visions.
  • The most recent example being the “Blocksize War” that played out between 2015 and 2017 where an initiative to increase transaction capacity by expanding the size of each Bitcoin block was defeated by others in the community who saw this as a threat to the network decentralisation they believed to be fundamental to what Bitcoin is.
  • Weisenthal notes that other players in the Crypto/DeFi domain have a different vision – Ethereum is currently one of the dominant architects of this alternative vision (but not the only one).
  • The distinguishing feature of Ethereum in Weisenthal’s thesis is that, in addition to being a cryptocurrency, it is also a “token”
  • He argues that, whereas Bitcoin requires a fundamental act of faith in the integrity of Bitcoin’s vision of the future of money, token’s have a broader set of uses to which you can assign value.
  • Once you introduce tokens the focus shifts to what precisely do you intend to do with them – in Weisenthal’s words “… once you’re in the realm of tokens, you don’t need faith, but you still need a point“
  • He notes that we have already seen some dead ends play out – Initial Coin Offerings were a big thing for a while but not any more partly due to many of the projects not stacking up but also because many of them were just another form of IPO that were still unregistered (hence illegal) securities offerings in the eyes of the law.
  • We have also seen some developments like Non Fungible Tokens that are interesting from a social perspective but not necessarily going to shake the foundations of the status quo.
  • A third possibility is that DeFi starts to become a real force that starts to shake up the existing players in the conventional financial system.
  • This third option is the one that Weisenthal (and I) find most interesting but there is still a long way to go.

This is most definitely a topic where I am likely to be missing something but Weisenthal’s article offers an interesting discussion on the contrasting visions, assumptions and objectives of the two currently dominant tribes (Bitcoin and Ethereum). Most importantly it highlights the fact that the vision of DeFi being pursued by Ethereum (or alternatives such as Solana) is radically different to the vision of the future of money being pursued by Bitcoin.

Tony – From the Outside

My Adventures in CryptoLand – Net Interest

Marc Rubinstein lays out a detailed account of his initial explorations of decentralised finance. His professional background (like mine) is grounded in the conventional financial system so I found this very useful. Even better it is a short read with some hard numbers (time and cost) on the user experience.

My only quibble is that he calls these decentralised financial enties “banks”. Call me pedantic but none of the institutions discussed are banks and I think the distinction still matters if we want to understand how much of conventional banking will remain as this new chapter in financial innovation plays out.
Link to Marc’s blog here – www.netinterest.co/p/my-adventures-in-cryptoland

Tony – From the Outside

The potential for computer code to supplant the traditional operating framework of the economy and society

I am very far from expert on the issues discussed in the podcast this post links to, I am trying however to “up-skill”. The subject matter is a touch wonky so this is not a must listen recommendation. That said, the questions of DeFi and cryptocurrency are ones that I believe any serious student of banking and finance needs to understand.

In the podcast Demetri Kofinas (Host of the Hidden Forces podcast) is interviewed by two strong advocates of DeFi and crypto debating the potential of computer code to supplant legal structures as an operating framework for society. Demetri supports the idea that smart contracts can automate agreements but argues against the belief that self-executing software can or should supplant our legal systems. Computer code has huge potential in these applications but he maintains that you will still rely on some traditional legal and government framework to protect property rights and enforce property rights. He also argues that it is naïve and dangerous to synonymize open-source software with liberal democracy.

I am trying to keep an open mind on these questions but (thus far) broadly support the positions Demetri argues. There is a lot of ground to cover but Demetri is (based on my non-expert understanding of the topic) one of the better sources of insight I have come across.

Tony – From the Outside